I hear people rave about how awesome Diva is and I just don't see it. It's a nice synth but I feel that it has some weaknesses.

I find it sounds somewhat harsh in the higher frequencies, it's an unpleasant harshness that neither zebra or ace have.

The filters have some nice warmth to them, but the front to back depth is just not there. When you sweep the filters on the KLAE MS-20 or V-Station there is a front to back sensation of the sound jumping out at you, whereas in Diva the sound stays flat and 2-dimensional, regardless of the interesting warmth and harmonics going on.

I hear the harshness more on certain sounds than others, if you lower the low-pass filter enough you can mask the harshness pretty well.

But when I play more aggressive lead sounds in Legacy Cell, V-station, and Dune, there isn't the tinnyness in the upper-frequencies that Diva has. On that sound demo when the filter was raised, you could definitely hear the harshness a bit that you wouldn't hear on other synths.

You can try to EQ it out, but it doesn't really work because then your sound becomes fundamentally different and it isn't just at one narrow frequency. I'd say it's centered around 6 kilohertz but EQ doesn't really eliminate it. In other synths the harshness isn't there to begin with.

Diva does sound quite good and is a valuable tool for the toolbox. But does it sound a lot better than the very best virtual analogs? IMO, not really.

It's really a waste of time to discuss how things sound, because we don't share the same pair of ears. It might be interesting to discover that not many people share your opinion, though. This would open up several possibilities:

- maybe you're desperately trying to find fault with something because it is supposedly "hyped"... you know, going the other way for the hell of it. (I think this happens a lot, really. I know I've done it. There's a nice German word for that phenomenon, it's called "Trotz" - "defiance" is the translation, but it doesn't quite nail the meaning)

- maybe your initial post is pure flame bait, because I don't know what you're expecting. Do you want us to show you you're wrong by telling you so? Will that change your opinion? Do you think you'll change our opinion? Do you think Urs will go "by Jove, he's right! I'll get to coding straight away! How come no one's noticed this before!"?

As far as triggering new ideas and thoughts - good luck with that. All I get are old ideas and nasty thoughts.

OK, lets say I download a plugin, I don't get the sound that I want from it straight away, and thus make a quick conclusion that it's a crap plugin, which sounds thin.

What you must understand is that people writing for such magazines as Sound on Sound have expert knowledge, and thus are much more capable to make a general conclusion about an instrument than either you or I.